Vizrea cuts staff, scales back

Vizrea won awards and journalistic praise earlier this year when it introduced a new service that seamlessly transferred photos between camera phones and personal computers.

Now, the Seattle startup — backed with more than $3 million from former Microsoft execs Ben Slivka, Brad Chase and others — looks to be hitting a wall.

Chief Executive Mike Toutonghi, a former Microsoft distinguished engineer, tells me in today’s story that they are “significantly scaling back operations.” It has already chopped half of the 16 person staff, with more cuts likely.

“We had been running the service at a pretty significant burn for some time and at this point we are not in the position to keep doing that, and so we are looking at our options,” Toutonghi said.

As I point out in the story, there is plenty of competition in this market: PixPulse, Ontela, ShoZu, Sharpcast and others. Here’s my earlier coverage of Vizrea when it launched at the Demo conference in February.